Leaving your children for the first time is a big step - there's just no getting around it. Whether you're re-joining the workforce after a career break or your maternity leave is coming to an end, the return to work can be nerve wracking. How will your little ones adapt to their new childcare setting? Will they be able to nap without you singing "Twinkle, Twinkle" for three hours? And, crucially, how will you navigate the combination of smart-new-work-blazer and slightly-snotty-toddler-goodbyes?
Ah, but wait... In times gone by, those might have been the biggest questions parents faced when they embarked on a search for childcare. In the last few years, though, it's become an altogether more stressful business. For a start, there's the issue of access. The news has been full of stories about nursery closures in the wake of the pandemic, and figures published by the National Day Nurseries Association last summer showed an alarming acceleration in the rate of nursery closures. Energy costs, as we're all painfully aware, have spiralled. The childcare sector is in the grip of a recruitment and retention crisis - possibly because providers can't afford to pay high enough wages to attract staff. For many nurseries, their business model simply isn't viable in the face of these increased financial constraints. Perhaps it's unsurprising, therefore, that some have closed their doors permanently. The impact, of course, is stark for parents. Even if you desperately want to return to work, there's a risk that it might be physically impossible. At best, in some areas of the UK, you may be joining a long waiting list; at worst, there may be nowhere for your little one to go. More worryingly, the research also shows that nurseries in deprived areas are statistically more likely to close. It may be that the parents who are under most financial pressure are those who'll struggle most to secure nursery places.
Then there's the question of cost. Well, perhaps less a question and more a large, black cloud of ongoing parental panic - for childcare costs have skyrocketed in recent years, as the running costs of childcare settings have themselves surged. According to the latest OECD data (for 2022), the typical net cost of a full time nursery place for two children equals a whopping 67% of the average salary. Little wonder, then, that according to one study, almost 1 in 4 UK parents have been forced either to leave a job or to stop studying due to childcare costs. The same study found that 74% of UK parents found it difficult to meet the cost of childcare and that 65% had had to "make major financial changes to their lives to pay for childcare", including taking on more work and spending less on their children's food. It appears that for some parents, going out to work is a luxury they simply can't afford.
But none of this is a secret, of course, In fact, it's such a well-known problem that in March 2023, the government announced that it intended to put in place a phased scheme to provide up to 30 free hours of childcare per week during term time to all working parents of under-5s by September 2025. They planned to implement the first phase in April 2024, in which working parents of two year olds would be able to access 15 free childcare hours a week during term time. But as all parents know, the course of truly lovely childcare arrangements never did run smooth. Firstly, the childcare industry protested that the funding being offered was insufficient to cover the costs of the scheme, and it was suggested that providers hadn't been properly consulted about how to make the project work. To compound matters, there are now concerns that the roll-out may be held up due to "technical glitches". A survey by the charity Pregnant Then Screwed has reported that only 11% of parents have so far been able to get hold of the government-issued code that they need to access the new arrangements, and that only 55% have been able to find a setting that will allow them to use the new "free hours" for 2 year olds. For those parents whose plans to return to the workplace were financially dependent on the proposed scheme, this confusion may spell bad news.
We're not experts in childcare, and we don't know whether the project will be up and running by April, but we take our 9-2-3 bobble hats off to the charities and campaigners who've been fighting for better and more affordable childcare provision for years. Certainly, these issues arise daily in our conversations with candidates. Parents often feel that the cost and availability of childcare is a significant obstacle that they need to overcome in order to return to the workplace and, importantly, to stay in employment throughout those years when their children are young. In practice, when these pressures become too overwhelming for the family budget, it seems that it's often women who end up stepping out of the workforce. We can't help feeling that something's gone wrong. After all, it surely has to be in the best interests of our society as a whole to enable parents to work if they want to? As well as increasing the tax paid to the UK treasury, enabling (both) parents to work can help to reduce the gender pay gap and help us all move towards a more equal society to pass on to our children - and that seems like a good outcome for everyone.
Whilst we appreciate that there's no easy fix for all of the difficulties faced by the childcare sector, there are ways in which flexible working patterns can be used to help to ease the strain on working parents. Many of our readers will already know all about part-time hours, which of course reduce the need for (and cost of) childcare. But to tackle the significant and structural difficulties we've discussed above, we think it's important that we're all a little more creative. We want to work together with employers to ensure that skilled and capable employees are able to make the best contribution possible to their teams and more broadly, to the UK workforce. And what might that look like in practice? Well, we've met families where each parent works compressed hours over 3 or 4 days, reducing the overall need for childcare. We've placed candidates in positions whose start or finish times are staggered, to enable them to drop their children at or pick their children up from school and so avoid the costs of breakfast and after school club - and the associated scramble for scarce places. Remote roles obviously eliminate employees' commuting time; bearing in mind that many nurseries or breakfast clubs only open at 8am, this might be the key which unlocks a world where you can drop your children off at nursery or school and still be back at your desk in time to start the working day. Annualised hours might enable employees to work more hours during term time whilst their children are at school (and often, depending on their industry, when demands on their professional time are highest), and fewer hours during the school holidays, when childcare provision can be astonishingly expensive and hard to source, whilst also often starting and finishing halfway through a traditional working day.
When you first start thinking about heading back to work, childcare restrictions can sometimes feel insurmountable. That said, the world of work's come a long way in the last four years; we think that with the right support, most of these seemingly-enormous hurdles can be transformed into minor bumps in the road. We're not going to pretend it's child's play - it can sometimes require a little bit of thought and imagination - but if we can all approach new roles with an open mind, and a sprinkling of flexibility, we believe that there's almost always a solution to be found. We know how vital it is for organisations to find just the right person to bring years of experience and wisdom to the table. We know how important it is to encourage potential candidates to be brave, and to seize the opportunity to get back into work with both hands. We know how magical it feels when we combine the two.